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100th birthdays

In ,

Just completed my contribution to a kind of compositional game of telephone, in honor of John Cage's 100th birthday, in which 100 composers were selected to produce a composition in which each person sees only one measure from the person before him/her. Will be premiered in New York and Leipzig in 2013, also on the web. Info (in German): here.


Speaking of 100th birthdays, just returned from the University of Victoria, where I gave a lecture entitled "Composing, Computing and Creativity." One of several Alan Turing Lectures in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth, I discussed how and why I create both music and software and how the two are closer to one another than one might suspect. Other lecturers during the two-week celebration included Leslie Valient and Jaron Lanier.

Abstract below:

Jorge Luis Borges envisioned a library of every possible book of a given length and set of characters. The size of this library, while not quite infinite is effectively so, dwarfing the number of atoms in the known universe by eighteen hundred orders of magnitude. The plight of the creative artist is similar: to pick exactly one of these possibilities.

My background is unusual in that I have pursued music composition and computer programming with equal intensity and with a deep conviction as to their fundamental creative nature, drawing inspiration one from the other. These two seemingly different domains share much in common, as both can be modeled by similar paradigms: making something from nothing (additive synthesis), making something from everything (subtractive synthesis), making something from something else (genetic algorithms), etc. Combining these two pursuits has led me to develop a musical approach based on hybridization, abstraction and concretization. It is often said that music composition cannot be taught. A more accurate statement would be that it can be taught only in a personal way, based on detached self-observation, and without any assumption that past behavior predicts future actions. In this talk I examine my wanderings in the labyrinthine Library of Babel.

Press : Musical America

In

At Other Minds, Anything (Still) Goes
By Georgia Rowe
MusicalAmerica.com
March 8, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO - Every year about this time, the Other Minds Festival of Contemporary Music brings composers and performers from around the world to San Francisco for a week of residency and three nights of unabashed music-making. The results are always eclectic, and frequently revelatory; under Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian, this year's edition - Other Minds 16 - demonstrated that new music thrives, and that this city remains a mecca for artists, iconoclasts and free thinkers.

Amirkhanian has an uncanny ability to identify important composers of the future while honoring the past; programs are divided between talent on the rise and new music's established composers. The first two concerts, March 3 and 4 at Kanbar Hall, featured Louis Andriessen and Han Bennink (from the Netherlands), I Wayan Balawan (Indonesia), Agata Zubel (Poland); Kyle Gann, Janice Giteck and David A. Jaffe (U.S.) A third concert, on March 5, offered additional works by Andriessen, Gann and Jason Moran.

A decided high point was the world premiere of "The Space Between Us," Jaffe's tribute to Henry Brant's pioneering work in spatial music. The composer's 20-minute opus places two string quartets - the Del Sol String Quartet, and members of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble - on opposite sides of the hall, while a percussionist onstage (Andrew Schloss), sends remote electronic signals, via radio drum, to a piano, two xylophones and an array of overhead chimes (the installation was by Seattle composer/inventor Trimpin).

Jaffe's score introduces richly textured, eerily prolonged voicings from the strings, which are interrupted by urgent, rhythmic phrases tapped out by percussion. As the work moves toward a poised, luminous conclusion, the instruments seem to reach out to one another, as if longing for connection. The performance stretched the mind and beguiled the ear.

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Press : Artssf.com

In

A real winner emerged among the contemporary compositions at the Other Minds Festival March 4, more than I had bargained for in an otherwise indifferent program.

The world premiere of David Jaffe’s “The Space between Us” was a felicitous linkage of acoustic/instrumental music with electronic sounds, the most successful we’ve encountered all this season. Like a rising tide, it lifted up the entire festival, which was littered with an array of indifferent pieces and improvisations ranging from predictable to ludicrous.

“The Space between Us” was spatial music, with a phalanx of string players ringing the audience, countering the electronic sound on stage coming from electro-percussionist Andrew Schloss, who made the piano play---look, no hands!---just by waving a wand over a sensor across the stage.

Watching a disclavier piano play by itself, without keyboardist, is disconcerting, to say the least. If there was a ghost in the house, it was that of the late Henry Brant, the spatial composer par excellence, to whose memory the work was dedicated. In the spatial mode, a chamber orchestra’s worth of string players was scattered all about the audience at Kanbar Hall, often performing a string chorale, with the audience fairly drowning in rich harmonic sound. Jaffe relishes restless themes in a diatonic way, spreading this feast out over 25 minutes, with equally rich applause at the end from a healthy crowd.

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Computer Music Journal Review by Brad Garton

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Review of "David A. Jaffe: XXIst Century Mandolin: Acoustic and Computer Music for the Mandolin," Computer Music Journal, 1994.

Reviewed by Brad Garton, New York, New York, USA.

The mandolin occupies a unique musical space-from Vivaldi to Stravinsky, its sparkling soprano timbre has colored many 'classical' compositions. To most contemporary listeners, however, the sound of a mandolin evokes images of a Dublin pub or a bluegrass festival in southern Indiana. For me, the mandolin seems to exist in all of these worlds simultaneously, evoking an interpenetrated! pan-stylistic musical universe. David Jaffe shares this multi-dimensional conception of the mandolin, stating that his early experience of his father's mandolin playing gave him "a taste for permeating the boundaries that separate musical styles." Mr. Jaffe discovered that "by combining diverse, seemingly irreconcilable stylistic elements, [he] was able to uncover a rich dynamic source of musical expression."

'XXlst Century Mandolin' is a tour de force demonstration of that "dynamic source of musical expression." The CD contains four large works: two for acoustic instruments (mandolins, of course) and two computer-generated pieces (with decidedly mandolin-like timbres, primarily using the Karplus-Strong algorithm and digitized mandolin fragments. Each of these works is a coherent melding of a range of compositional and performance styles, with results that are truly unique.

If I were asked to summarize David Jaffe's music in a single word, it would have to be, 'different.' I don't mean this as a dismissal of his music (in the way that many use the adjective 'interesting', for his compositions display a musical virtuosity that is highly original -- there's the 'difference' -- and often quite moving.

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Soledad O'Brien 1998 MSNBC interview

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This video begins with percussionist Andrew Schloss demonstrating the "Drum/Piano" hybrid instrument we developed for "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World." It continues with discussions of the RadioDrum and its relative the "radio baton" with inventor Max Mathews (co-inventor: Bob Boie), and includes an interview with me (at time 4:00), as well as a description of the physical modeling techniques pioneered by Julius Smith and myself in such works as Silicon Valley Breakdown and further developed as part of the Stanford University Sondius program, and at Staccato Systems, Inc., the company I co-founded with Julius Smith and several others.

In 2012, Soledad O'Brien hosted one of the debates between Barak Obama and Mitt Romney.